A leader of the Ysleta school board ramrodded a program aimed at helping students that was administered by an El Paso man who is now facing public corruption charges and who had powerful political connections.

The program, which went by the initials PADRES and was promoted by then-president of the board Marty Reyes, cost the district $170,000 and did little to fulfill its obligations. Reyes is the sister-in-law of U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, and the wife of his brother and campaign manager, Jesus "Chuy" Reyes.

The contract for the program and how it was awarded to Aliviane Inc. demonstrates the influence its former CEO, Cirilo "Chilo" Madrid, had in getting millions of dollars in government contracts in El Paso.

(Victor Calzada / El Paso Times)

Madrid, who was indicted on 11 federal charges in December, headed several companies that have become targets of FBI investigations.

Three board members criticized the student program at the Ysleta school district and how the contract was awarded the first time -- apparently in violation of state competitive-bidding laws. After receiving a complaint, the U.S. Department of Education is now looking into how the contract was awarded and how federal money was spent.

"All we can confirm is that we have received the referral from (the Government Accountability Office) and are looking at it," Catherine Grant of the Education Department said in an email. "We are neither confirming nor denying an investigative effort at this time.

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In 2009, Marty Reyes argued the district should pay for a new dropout-recovery program.

But after 18 months, officials with Aliviane could not show they had done the evaluation work their contract required, and district teachers and administrators found the program inadequate.

Aliviane and YISD set ambitious goals in their contract, such as cutting the absenteeism of participating students in half and increasing standardized test scores by 10 percent.

The school district doesn't have the data to tell whether the program met any of its goals.

Aliviane promised it would pay S. Fernando Rodriguez, the former director the Criminal Justice Program at the University of Texas at El Paso, $10,000 a year to serve as its evaluator.

On June 12, 2010, after the first six months of the program, all Aliviane could claim was that participating students "self-reported" improved attendance and better grades, according to documents obtained through requests under the Texas Public Information Act.

When the contract was renewed the following year, monthly reports said the program's success in meeting its performance measures would "be determined at the end of the school year.

" Yet the school district could produce no such report for the school year that ended last June.

Connections

The contract with Aliviane is one of several links between the agency and Rep. Reyes, who has not been charged with wrongdoing, and the latest developments in El Paso's public-corruption scandal.

Jesus "Chuy" Reyes is a former Aliviane board member.

In another connection between Rep. Reyes and Aliviane, a former staff member for the congressman, Guillermo Valenzuela, took Chuy Reyes' seat on the Aliviane board, and then left the congressman's staff in 2009 to work full time for Aliviane.

At the time that Valenzuela left Rep. Reyes' staff to work for Aliviane, the congressman helped get a $250,000 congressional earmark for Aliviane.

REPORTER

Marty Schladen

The congressman also made a floor speech in the House praising the organization.

Madrid has been a political contributor over the years to Democrats and Republicans -- including George W. Bush and Rick Perry.

But the biggest recipient of Madrid's largesse has been Rep. Reyes, who received $6,800 of the $11,800 Madrid has given to candidates for federal office since 2003, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Rep. Reyes said he was unaware of any corruption by Madrid or Aliviane and asked the FBI to investigate both Madrid and Aliviane after the El Paso Times reported that Madrid obtained a doctorate from a school described as a diploma mill and he gave a deposition in which he admitted plagiarizing.

Ruben "Sonny" Garcia

In a recent interview, Marty Reyes said she led the effort to use federal stimulus money to hire Aliviane at Ysleta High School, but she said it had nothing to do with her husband's or brother-in-law's history with Aliviane.

Aliviane "had helped us before and that's why I went to them -- to see if they could help us again," Marty Reyes said.

Vendor in the spotlight

Aliviane was run until January by Madrid, who is now under indictment on federal charges that he participated in a scheme to use bribes to win a $600,000 county contract to help mentally ill children and then did not provide services.

In 2010, Madrid said in a deposition that as part of the contract, he was paid $100,000 to produce a 20-page report, some of which he plagiarized from the Internet.

The county contract Madrid benefited from went to LKG Enterprises Inc., a company owned by Madrid's co-defendant, Ruben "Sonny" Garcia.

Rodriguez, who was supposed to evaluate Aliviane's work for the Ysleta school district, also been lead evaluator for the LKG contract that is now the subject of the federal indictment. Rodriguez is also under investigation by the FBI.

Another company run by Madrid and Garcia, New Beginnings of Texas, is the subject of an FBI investigation because of a contract with the El Paso Independent School District in 2002 that produced little for the $3.2 million taxpayers paid for the program. As with the Aliviane program at Ysleta, it was supposed to provide truancy prevention.

Its evaluator, Rodriguez, gave the program good reviews, but he was paid by the company whose program he was evaluating. At least one EPISD administrator, Arturo Peralta, said the program didn't work, and he later claimed he was demoted for saying so.

And, as with the Aliviane contract at Ysleta, an EPISD board member -- not administrators -- brought the New Beginnings proposal to the school district. Former Trustee Sal Mena requested that the item be on the agenda so Madrid could propose the program.

Mena and former Trustee Carlos Cordova have pleaded guilty to public-corruption charges for accepting bribes in exchange for their votes, not associated with New Beginnings.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development criticized another arrangement between Aliviane and the Housing Authority of the City of El Paso.

HUD said Jaime Rubinstein, vice chairman of the Housing Authority board, improperly steered a contract to Aliviane for a family-counseling program. At the same time that Aliviane was awarded that contract, Rubinstein became a paid consultant for New Beginnings, the Madrid-controlled company that had contracted with the El Paso school district.

As questions about Madrid, Garcia and their endeavors continue to mount, Marty Reyes said blame for the failure of the Aliviane program at the Ysleta school district rests with school administrators and not Aliviane.

"They were set up for failure," Marty Reyes said of Aliviane. "I don't believe it was intentional, but if you don't have buy-in from the administration ... it's not going anywhere."

A different model

The origins of Aliviane's Parent Advocates Designing Roadmaps for Engagement and Support -- or PADRES -- program are uncertain. It's clear that Marty Reyes led the drive in 2009 for the school board to adopt and pay for it using federal stimulus money.

Through another agency, Communities in Schools, the district already had a truancy-prevention program, but Marty Reyes pushed for Aliviane as another program to help students.

It proposed to identify at-risk students and find parents to volunteer for training so they could coach the students to stay in school, attend class and improve their grades.

"I was a very strong advocate for this program because I felt my job as a trustee is to be able to provide every type of opportunity and every type of support system we can provide for those students who are at risk," Marty Reyes said. "If we can find something that will work, then by all means, let's work with it."

Marty Reyes said parents in the school district had praised a similar program Aliviane had run in the Ysleta district during the early 1990s.

However, in response to an open-records request, Ysleta administrators said the PADRES contract was the only one the district had ever had with Aliviane, and Aliviane officials said it had never had a contract with the district.

Frank Burton, the principal of Ysleta High School, said he had worked with Madrid on a program at Eastwood High School to keep children off drugs and another to reduce gang activity while he was principal of Hillcrest Middle School.

Burton said a parent approached him more recently about establishing a program involving parents in truancy prevention. He said that the parent was a friend of an assistant principal but that neither he nor the assistant principal remembers her name.

Burton said Aliviane came up during one of several meetings he had with the assistant principal, the parent and Marty Reyes. He said he could not remember who proposed that Aliviane run the program.

"The program was mentioned, and it was a program that fit what we needed to have at that time and that was parental involvement," Burton said.

"If you look at the overall, it just didn't end up being cost-effective for Ysleta High School. It did work with some kids, but it didn't meet the goals that we had expected."

Burton said nobody ever pressured him to support the Aliviane program.

"I don't think I was pushed anywhere along the process," Burton said. "I was never pressured into doing anything for Ysleta High School. My job is to take care of the school."

Early skepticism

On Sept. 9, 2009, advocates of the PADRES program went to the Ysleta school board meeting ready to make a full-court press.

Liza Montelongo, then a member of the school board, said that Madrid packed the chamber with children and adults wearing green Aliviane T-shirts.

In a video recording of the meeting, one can hear the audience applauding when trustees and others said good things about the Aliviane proposal. At one point in the meeting, Trustee Robert Ward said, "It is impressive to see so many green shirts out there because usually we don't have anybody here."

Marty Reyes praised a three-month program in which Aliviane counseled 10 at-risk students from Ysleta High in April 2009. Aliviane did not charge the district for the program, Marty Reyes said.

"Even though it was only three months, I saw these children not fall through the cracks," she said during the school board meeting.

Burton also highly praised the program.

"When I was approached about this program ... I fell in love with it," he said.

But not everybody on the school board was impressed.

Trustee Beth Riggs said that, as described, the plan for the program was too vague.

"I'm not seeing a lot of detail," she said. "But I see a very healthy price tag."

Riggs and Montelongo also questioned the propriety of a school board trustee -- Marty Reyes -- proposing a vendor for a business contract that other vendors didn't have a chance to compete to get.

"I kind of wonder why you're not coming into the district through normal procedures?" Riggs asked Aliviane representatives. "Why is it coming in through board members?"

Despite that concern, its cost and its lack of specifics, the board voted 4-3 to award a contract to Aliviane.

State law requires that all contracts for goods and services of more than $50,000 be competitively bid.

Chavez is awaiting trial in connection with a scheme of bribes and kickbacks in an unrelated case.

The superintendent, Zolkoski, was supposed to negotiate a price with Aliviane. But after district administrators raised concerns over the lack of competitive bidding, the school district issued a request for proposals, received two and on Nov. 11, 2009, it awarded a $119,000-a-year contract to Aliviane by the same vote.

Evaluation promises

During the Sept. 9, 2009, board meeting, Ivonne Tapia, who would become director of PADRES, sought to reassure skeptical board members.

She said Rodriguez, the UTEP professor, would serve as outside evaluator.

"He will evaluate outcomes that are not working and tell us what is not working," Tapia said, according to a video of the meeting.

Rodriguez, who was paid at least $914,000 by Aliviane from 2001 to 2009 for other projects, has never found serious problems with an Aliviane program, the agency's deputy director has said.

Rodriguez also appears to have found no shortcomings in LKG's execution of its contract with the Border Children's Mental Health Collaborative. Federal prosecutors and the county government now accuse the company of not providing services for children with severe mental illnesses even though it was paid almost $600,000 to do so.

Rodriguez founded and ran UTEP's Open Source Research Lab -- the recipient of a $400,000 earmark requested by Rep. Reyes.

But he now is on paid leave from UTEP while the university investigates whether to punish him for not reporting outside work as required by university policy.

As with Madrid, Rodriguez has contributed to Rep. Reyes' campaigns. Last August, he gave the congressman $2,000, federal records show.

Performance issues

The Ysleta school district provided 113 pages in response to an open-records request for documents related to the evaluation of the PADRES program.

Rodriguez's name appears nowhere in them, but monthly reports make big claims about reductions in absences and tardiness. The report for February 2010, for example, said that absences for students in the program had dropped 75 percent and that tardies had fallen 84 percent.

By May 2010, Aliviane officials were backtracking on those claims.

"We found that we could not account for the tardies and absences since we are not familiar with the school attendance guidelines for managing attendance," Aliviane said in its monthly report. "Therefore, to ensure accuracy of attendance improvement, attendance outcome data will be obtained from the school attendance office."

Aliviane apparently never obtained the data, but it still boasted in its annual report that the PADRES program had improved attendance and grades. Because the agency did not have district data, it reported that 58 percent of students in the program said they were going to class more regularly and 55 percent said they had improved their grades.

In 2011 monthly reports, Aliviane said it would report how it had done on those benchmarks at the end of the school year, but the school district produced no such report despite multiple open-records requests.

Montelongo said the lack of results proves what she suspected all along.

"It was just a useless program," she said.

But Marty Reyes said the problem was with uncooperative school administrators, not Aliviane.

She said she would call program director Tapia and ask, "When can we get a report? She said, 'We're gathering data and the only thing is we have not received information back from academics.' "

"They were sending data into academics, academics was not responding," Marty Reyes said of the district's Division of Academics.

Asked whether she took any steps to clear the roadblock, Marty Reyes, the program's biggest supporter on the board, said she did not.

"That would be very easy to do, but I didn't want to be micro managing because I wanted this program to work on its own merits," she said. "I didn't want anybody out there saying Marty is trying to strong-arm them."

Zolkoski, the superintendent, said the administration didn't do anything to sabotage the program. He said he supported it because Burton, the Ysleta principal, wanted to do it.

"Every program that the principals want to try, we want to help them, but the quality of the program really rests on the campus," Zolkoski said.

Political considerations

Ysleta school trustee Ramirez initially supported the contract but later voted against renewing funding because he thought the company was not producing enough.

Ramirez said representatives from Aliviane never asked him to vote for the contract.

"We intended that more families would be involved and contacted and that the grades would be raised a little bit more," Ramirez said. "We had to do an evaluation of cost and impact, and that's why I voted against it."

Former trustees Montelongo and Mendoza said there were political overtones to Aliviane's contract with the district and, they claim, they faced political retribution because they opposed it.

"When I started asking all of those tough questions, everybody started beating me up," said Montelongo, now a candidate for the County Commissioners Court.

In October 2009, after Montelongo took to the radio to criticize PADRES and other school board actions, Marty Reyes tried unsuccessfully to get the school board to condemn Montelongo for her "unauthorized" remarks.

Mendoza said there was a clear connection between the way trustees voted on the Aliviane contract and their continued tenure on the school board.

"The three members who questioned it are the three members who are no longer on the board," said Mendoza, who lost his 2010 election by six votes. "I lost because there was a lot of bad stuff put out about me."

Arlinda Valencia, president of the Ysleta Teachers Association, said that in elections after the PADRES contract was signed, she saw people at polling places holding signs supporting trustees who voted for the contract.

"We asked where they were from," Valencia said. "They said they were with the PADRES program. It's all tied together."

Marty Reyes said she hadn't heard of Aliviane workers participating in school board elections. She said she also didn't remember Garcia, Madrid's longtime associate, working on her initial campaign for school board.

"Golly Moses, that was 11 and a half years ago; there were a lot of people," she said. "There were a lot of people that helped me.

"Specifically Sonny Garcia, he's a friend, he's a longtime friend of my husband, Chuy. I know he's known him since high school."

Valencia said Garcia played a key role in Marty Reyes' first election.

"He was her campaign manager," Valencia said.

The Teachers Association worked to elect Marty Reyes to her first term in 2002, although the union has since withdrawn its support.

During that first campaign, Valencia said, she and other teachers would go to Julio's Cafe Corona and get their marching orders from Garcia and then go spend the day knocking on doors.

"And every time we walked, we'd have to go back and report to him," Valencia said.

Marty Reyes might not remember Garcia's work on her first campaign, but she didn't disguise her high opinion of him. She said it came as a shock in December to learn of his and Madrid's indictments and arrests.

"It was a very sad day for many people who had known Chilo and Sonny," Marty Reyes said. "They were very strong contributing members of our community, and many people went to them for advice on how to fix a problem."

She also was staunch in her defense of Aliviane.

"Aliviane has done great things in this community and Mr. Madrid was an excellent CEO for that nonprofit in helping the community," Marty Reyes said.

Marty Schladen may be reached at mschladen@elpasotimes.com; 546-6127. Reporter Zahira Torres contributed to this story.

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